Six Dos and Don’ts for Creating Better Landing Pages

Six Dos and Don’ts for Creating Better Landing Pages

In B2B marketing, landing pages are often one of the first interactions a company has with a sales lead. There are at least three reasons to direct visitors to a landing page instead of your home page. First, that prospect clicked that link for a reason. Use a landing page to deliver exactly what the prospect expected or hoped for, and your relationship is off to a great start. Landing pages also provide opportunities to test and optimize design, content, calls to action, and offers, which you probably don’t want to do on your home page. In addition, prospects and customers come in through different avenues; landing pages let you see where traffic and conversions come from, so you can refine and focus your ad dollars.

Wondering how you can get the most out of these targeted webpages? Here are six tips for what you can do (and what not to do) when creating landing pages:

1. Do: Design for a short attention span

The web’s a busy place, so make it easy for people to follow your message from the site where they found it to your landing page. Keep the message above the fold, use bulleted text and crisp, clean language. It’s important that your offer be completely on the page, with no scrolling required to find or follow it.

2. Don’t: Have other navigation

It’s a common mistake to link to other products or offers on a landing page. But additional links can dilute your messaging or distract from your call to action. Keep it simple and keep it focused. It’s also harder to measure the impact of your offer, messages, and page design when there’s more than one focus on a page.

3. Do: Make your offer compelling

Fulfill expectations and reinforce why the prospect clicked on that link to begin with. Make sure your content and offer grab attention and provide value.

4. Don’t: Ask too many questions

Landing pages are a great way to get more information about potential customers, but as with any new relationship, asking too many questions too quickly may seem like an invasion of privacy. If you’re using a form or survey, ask only for essentials like name and email at first. If the relationship continues, trust will build and you can ask more questions. If you build forms with conditional logic, you can show or hide data fields based on what users select for another field on that form.

Half the value of landing pages is that they let you serve self-selected prospects with very specific needs. Keep your offer focused to this target audience; don’t try to make it fit everyone. Getting traffic from people who don’t fit your target demographic won’t increase conversions.

Good landing pages give your customers-to-be the reasons and means to take the next step on the buyer’s journey. And they give you a powerful tool for understanding your prospective customers and your market, insight that can help convert clicks into sales. Try these six tips to make your landing pages a more productive tool in your integrated, multi-channel marketing campaigns, and let us know how it goes.